It’s hard to complain too much about a company charging for its services — well, at least it’s hard for news companies to complain when they’re busy putting up paywalls of their own. But data-oriented journalists will be among the people most impacted by this change, since map mashups using Google Maps data have been a big part of the field since chicagocrime.org (which evolved into EveryBlock) debuted back in 2005. Whenever you see a map mashed up with a set of local data on a news site, there’s a very good chance it was built with the Google Maps API.

The news has sent the news developer universe looking for other options:

Bing and Yahoo both offer map APIs, and there are open source options available. But for news organizations that had been relying on Google’s service for map products, it’s time to scramble — either to free up some money in the budget or to search for an alternative. Google says it will “begin enforcing the usage limits in early 2012.”

Thanks for the post. Here’s a geocoding
feature that will make your applications smarter and more interactive. Instead
of displaying plain text, any address-centric data can be displayed on your
site with a live map from Yahoo! or Google. Users will get more accurate
information and be engaged in the process http://www.caspio.com/extend/platform-extensions/map-mashup.aspx